Month: January 2009

Thirty victories, by the end of the season, would be a nice achievement by these star-crossed, NBA-conspired-against, gritty, referee-ruined Warriors.

All sarcasm aside (which is tough for me, I admit), 30 victories would be a very, very nice achievement for the Warriors, given where they’ve been, where they are now, and the obvious roster and chemistry problems.

If the Warriors get to 30 victories, I promise, I’ll give them their due. They will deserve a nod. Is it possible? Is it fair to toss out 30 wins as a realistic goal for this team?

The Warriors are 14-31 as they stand today, with 37 games left. After that just-completed 7-game homestand, they’ve played 21 at home, 24 on the road. That means they have 20 home games left to play, 17 left on the road. (They’re currently 10-11 at home, 4-20 on the road.)

They’d need to go 16-21 down the backstretch to hit 30 victories. I wouldn’t think they’re going to do it, with the fairly tough slate of opponents they’ve got left.

But then again 16-21 isn’t asking too terribly much out of a team that presumably is getting an injection of a full-speed Monta Ellis and Marco Belinelli and Brandan Wright at some point, added to team with a healthy Stephen Jackson, Andris Biedrins, Jamal Crawford, Corey Maggette and others.

Of course, it also might all fall apart or somebody else could get hurt or the Warriors might really only be what their record says they are…

But the Warriors Partisans hate when I bring up little things like that. Only positive! BUY TICKETS!!

Here’s what we know: The GSWs almost always fill Oracle Arena. They’ve been hurt, have faced plenty of teams that were also hurt, and they’ve been mostly terrible so far this season.

As both Matts point out, the only other person to go through a second interview was Scott Linehan, who was offered the 49ers’ OC job the day of interview No. 2. Linehan, of course, thought about it for a few days, turned it down, then took the same job with Detroit.

I know Mike Singletary and Scot McCloughan aren’t up late at night worrying about my judgment, but I’d be fine with Hue Jackson as 49ers off-coor. (I still think the length and clunkiness of the search raise some alarm bells, especially the Reeves-Linehan interludes, but if MS/SM end up with a good choice, for now, that’s all that matters.)

Jackson’s been around a lot of different situations, he’s a sharp guy, he gets along well with players and he must’ve done some good work with Joe Flacco this season.

Also, Jackson probably wouldn’t mind a bit of security and might sacrifice some flexibility to get it.

If the 49ers want any OC to commit at least for two or three years–which might have caused some antsiness with others candidates–that might not be a problem for Jackson, who has lived in the Bay Area before when he coached under Mariucci at Cal.

Plus, Baltimore is an all-power, physical offense that limits the scale of what the QB can or should do, and you know that’s what Singletary wants with the 2009 49ers.

Now I wonder: Could Jackson convince Singletary and Scot McCloughan to go after his coaching pride and joy, pending free agent Bengals WR T.J. Houshmandzadeh?

The 49ers’ search for an offensive coordinator, which Mike Singleary many weeks ago said he wanted to complete “yesterday,” is still not done, may still have days or weeks to go…

It’s clumsy. And it has given new life to all those issues NFL people worried about when Singletary first stepped into the head coach job, summed up by one urgent thought: WHAT IS HE GOING TO DO ON OFFENSE?

(And a little more quietly: What confident, ambitious offensive coach would want to work under Singletary’s stringent, thundering orders? We may be finding out that answer.)

Now, I don’t know if the MS/SM tag-team offered Reeves the job, wanted to offer it to him or carefully measured his energy and vision and decided NOT to offer anything to Reeves.

Maybe they always figured Jeff Jagodzinski or Hue Jackson or somebody else were great candidates and just wanted a what-the-heck taste of Reeves’ offensive knowledge.

But when you go almost a full month into an off-coor search process… if you fly in somebody who hasn’t worked in the NFL for years, if you pull the Dan Reeves Card, you look pretty ridiculous if you don’t end up hiring him.

And that comes after Scott Linehan turned the 49ers down and happily took the off-coor job with 0-16 Detroit and new coach Jim Schwartz, instead.

Fine and dandy. Still… the Cards are a remarkably non-Super team, or at least they were in a thorougly mediocre regular season in which they went 9-7 and barely outscored their opponents, 427-426.

My point is that the NFL regular season has always and should always mean something. And if Arizona wins, after the Giants won with a +22 last year (over +315 New England), then we’re seeing the end of significance for the NFL season, which is not good.

We don’t need another NCAA tournament or NHL postseason thing with the NFL–just get in, get hot, everything is re-set for the postseason. I like regular seasons that mean something. The NFL is built on its regular season meaning something.

That’s what I mentioned in the column, and in doing, I skimmed over the previous Super entrants and noted that a +1 points-differential is awful in the Big Game.

Today, I decided to look up and record EVERY Super Bowl team–which meant going into the year-by-year NFL standings–and that took time and space, so this is much longer and later than I ever dreamed.

(Somebody else might’ve already done the math, but I haven’t seeen it. This is all me, my scribbles and $5 calculator, so there definitely could be minor errors.)

But if I really want to put the 2008 Cardinals into proper perspective, that’s what I had to do. And yes, the Cardinals are the worst statistical team to ever grace a Super Bowl:

* Arizona gave up, as noted earlier, 426 points, BY FAR the most ever surrendered in a regular season by any Super Bowl entrant.

Now we know why Baron Davis isn’t bothering to play with the Clippers these days. Whew. Awful.

No talent, no effort, no coaching, no defense, no idea, no beat writers traveling with them, no-can-dribble, nothing going on with that team.

Of course, that doesn’t excuse BD if BD is, indeed, doing the first-year-of-a-big-deal-tank-job, but I dunno if I’d want to play with Ricky Davis, Cheikh Samb or Fred Jones, either.

This bunch of low-energy Clippers players–without Davis, Chris Kaman, Marcus Camby and Zach Randolph and starring some of the worst dreck in NBA memory–would’ve had a tough time against North Carolina or Pittsburgh and probably half of the D-League.

Actually, this game looked like a D-League game. And not a good D-League game.

But that’s the NBA–you only can beat the team you’re scheduled to play, and today, the Warriors beat the terrible horrendous awful quit-quit-tank Clippers, 107-92.

That gets the Warriors to 14-31 for the season, still tracking right at 24 to 26 wins by the end of the season. Because there is no comparable remaining stretch anywhere near as easy as this just-completed 7-game homestand. NOT CLOSE.

The Warriors went 4-3, losing two buzzer-beaters and a triple-OT game, and yes, yes, maybe they were 30 or 40 seconds away from a 7-0 homestand.

But, um, it doesn’t work that way in the NBA standings. It only works that way if you’re deeply depressed and want to grasp at any positives you can possibly imagine.

The Warriors got Monta Ellis back, and are awaiting the return of Jamal Crawford, Marco Belinelli and Brandan Wright. Then we’ll see what this team is capable of… or not.

Random thoughts and notes on a Sunday morning, done quickly because I’d better start writing my real column before I head off to Warriors-Clippers tonight, though I’m not sure why I’m heading to Warriors-Clippers:

1) My goodness, the 49ers must be getting desperate. Jed York is practically begging Al Davis to the table, and Jed is getting the NFL honchos to help out with the public nudging… that is desperate.

I understand the desperateness. That’s precisely the state of the 49ers’ stadium efforts. Desperate bordering on null and void.

So Jed is tossing a Hail Mary. Problem: He needs Al Davis to respond to it. When’s the last time that ever worked on any project in the history of the NFL?

2) Maybe it’s the only shot at this. Hard to argue. This story ties all that together, no question.

A shared stadium does make practical sense and always has, or else the two NY/NJ teams wouldn’t be doing it now–you double the home dates and split the costs.

But for all the sweet talk about the Giants and Jets coming together… they were already playing in the same stadium, which the Giants dominate and always will dominate. This is not the case with the 49ers and Raiders.

3) OF COURSE Al Davis will never put his team in a shared situation that he does not dominate (sorry Jed, that 50-50 split would never happen, more like 80-20 leaning to Raiders, if I know Al) and that is in… Santa Clara.

Remember, Davis pocketed a cool $10M long ago from the city of Irwindale just for letting them imagine he might move the Raiders there.

How much would he charge the Yorks to even acknowledge the possibility of a shared stadium outside of the East Bay? $20M? $50M?

The Raiders playing in Santa Clara? Does not compute. Not for me, not for you, not for (I guarantee you) AD, not for anybody except the most desperate of the desperate.